Tag Archives: mary halvorson

Seven concerts, a foot of snow, and 200 miles later, we’re back with the exciting third installment of the Marc Ribot residency week at the Stone! (Previous reviews, if you missed them, can be found here and here.) Today we’ll be covering the two Marc Ribot Trio + guest shows, which were the late sets on January 31st and February 1st.

The Trio consists of Marc Ribot on guitar, Henry Grimes on upright bass and occasionally violin, and Chad Taylor on drums. I saw them a few times back in November at the Village Vanguard (see my review/video/etc. here), and after those stellar performances I was really looking forward to seeing them in the Stone with a group of good friends. I was expecting them to mix things up a bit since they had invited special guests each night: guitarist Mary Halvorson on Friday and keyboardist Cooper-Moore on Saturday. I’d seen both musicians before and knew they were both top-notch performers who could potentially add something really special to the Trio.

(Apologies for not getting a photo of Cooper-Moore, he was sitting with his back to me and I never really got a chance to get a photo of him that would show anything more than the back of his head.)

Friday and Saturday’s performances were the most crowded of the whole residency; I’m not sure how much of that was because of the appeal of the line-ups those nights and how much was because of the fact that it was the weekend, and maybe the weather played into it as well. (I can personally attest that it was painfully cold on Tuesday and Wednesday when we were waiting in line outside. Literally painful, as in “my exposed skin was really hurting right up until I lost all the feeling in my face.”) At any rate, it was packed, with people standing in the back and sitting on the floor, and people were turned away at the door after the venue reached capacity.

There are pros and cons to the general-admission no-advance-tickets strategy, but one thing it does is (more…)

This weekend I attended both days of the Winter Jazzfest marathon in Greenwich Village. It’s a festival that has a unique appeal to those of us who are particularly manic about concerts; it’s basically an all-you-can-eat buffet of live music held in a bunch of venues in Greenwich Village. For one relatively low price you can run around and hear as many bands as you can stuff in your ears in the time allotted. Most sets were 45 minutes with a few double-length sets here and there. (I took it relatively easy and caught eleven ensembles plus the “round robin” duo improvisation set.)

This year was the tenth anniversary of Winter Jazzfest and featured a huge amount of bands (more than ninety). It was, of course, impossible to see them all, and there were some tough decisions to be made. We’d been warned by friends about previous years having long lines and big crowds at some venues, so we simplified our schedule a bit and tried to do multiple sets in the same venues as much as we could (without sacrificing the bands we most wanted to see). I spent most of my time in the NYU Law venue and the Judson Memorial Church, which was a pretty cool-looking room:

(That’s Ches Smith on the left and Shahzad Ismaily on the right, during Ceramic Dog’s late-night Saturday set.)

The funny thing was that after I simplified things and tried to make my schedule less ambitious, I somehow ended up seeing (more…)